Beyond Serb-Croat Apologies: Testing a Model of Political Reconciliation in Post-war Croatia

Abstract

One of the key themes in the three decades after the wars of Yugoslav dissolution has been reconciliation between Croatia and Serbia, two former Yugoslav republics that participated in the bloody fighting between 1991–1995 after Croatia declared independence. The recent inflation of the use of the term reconciliation requires a narrow and precise definition, which enables researchers and practitioners to adapt it to real-world cases and the available empirical evidence. In this article, the authors rely on the main features of the so-called “need-based model of socio-emotional reconciliation”, which was derived from social psychology to examine inter-group processes after violent conflict. They propose several amendments to this model to make it feasible for the analysis of inter-state relations, regarding reconciliation as a process, not a stable result of reconciliatory performances. They adopt this model to bilateral relations between Croatia and Serbia, with a focus on apologies related to the siege of Vukovar (1991) and the aftermath of Operation Storm (1995), and then discuss the model’s suitability for international relations theory.